skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mastodon is absolutely not dead, and will outlast both Twitter and Bluesky as far as I can tell -- as someone who has been an early adopter in every single social media platform (or precursor thereof) since the mid-90's. Why? There isn't some top-down capitalistic motive to destroy the platform. It will continue to exist, because it is a protocol defined/evolved by the community with zero incentive for profitability or pleasing of rich shareholders. It keeps plodding along, no noise, no ads, no algorithm, just people communicating with each other.

Especially as communities evolve and gain greater trust amongst each other, the platform will actually strengthen as far as I can tell -- this is already happening, as there are servers we know we can "trust" and those we know we can't (mastodon.social) because they have open-door policy and poor moderation.

I could go on about it all day, but ActivityPub is so far the absolute best technology for social communities I've ever seen/used (not that there aren't things that can be improved, of course).
+1 for atatuin
Their moat is lock-in across services now. People are "Google" users not just "web search" users.
That's a good question, why do they choose to pay for certain content while also continuing to insist that all publicly available content should be fair game? It's an incoherent stance, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that those "licensing deals" are out-of-court legal settlements in a trenchcoat.
That would depend on the files in /etc/systemd/system/ :D
Much starts from shelter, food, and safety.

You have a very good point that further supports are needed, however living in an urban area, I don't know if I can watch another 20 years waiting for the entire chain of everything to be setup before starting.

THese types of solutions from the private/volunteer sector do things that can't be unseen and often initiate conversations about what progress looks like.

The new types of shelter buildings with integrated services right in them, like other things are postive beacons.

If something cna improve the day to day, it's hard to say I'm against it when I'm sitting inside and someone who I might be saying it about isn't sitting inside.
I’m with you. Every same conversation is about judgment and self-aggrandizement rarely about discussing problems, finding solutions or appreciating opportunities.

Bluesky is fine. It’s not perfect. It’s struggling to deal with demands for viewpoint moderation. It’s a public benefit corp so venture capitalists have less to complain about. It has good tools to deal with most things. The people who are working on it seem competent and sincere.

I like the phrase, karma farming.
> Rejecting electoralism and demanding or organizing toward an alternative is not nihilism.

I replied to this comment:

And yet people will mock you for saying that
both parties are the same.

The Democratic and Republican parties are demonstrably "not the same." This is evident in policy positions and party platforms. The assertion quoted reasonably satisfies the referenced definition:

In philosophy, nihilism (/ˈnaɪ(h)ɪlɪzəm, ˈniː-/; from Latin
nihil 'nothing') is any viewpoint, or a family of views,
that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of
human existence, namely knowledge, morality, or
meaning.

To date, the United States federal government has been defined as a representative democracy. A critical component of same is participatory elections. Therefore, I do not understand your premise of "rejecting electoralism[sic]" for "organizing toward an alternative", unless the intent is to no longer have a representative government.

What alternative to an electoral process do you have in mind? And please be specific so that I may understand.
I wonder why they pegged at 1.96 instead of 2?
US state - maybe not. The state of China - perhaps /s

Jokes aside, I signed up for TikTok over the summer and while it feels like it is not heavily skewed either way it 100% can be gamed (see Romanian elections)…

I believe that the only way social media could be net positive so the society when the comes to politics is with account identity proofing like IAL2. this is also why talking about “freedom of speech” when it comes to social media is ridiculous because while individuals should have freedom of speech (rogue)government-controlled bots are not afforded those same liberties.
The "Silicon Valley can do no bad" crowd. He's making it sound like Altman's just following a well trod path here when they're clearly doing something novel and actually quite evil.
> Epidemic disease also didn't spread in advance of European contact. The demographic shattering diseases that led to those (fairly questionable) population loss figures happened after sustained European contact.

Yup, the biggest killer - smallpox - was probably introduced by Pánfilo de Narváez‘s expedition to arrest Cortez’ while he was already well into his campaign to conquer the Aztecs, decades after Columbus. Europe and North Africa were experiencing their own sporadic outbreaks at the time and it’s likely that a slave named Francisco Eguia brought it over Several of the indigenous people in the Caribbean were already wiped out because of the awful conditions of their enslavement by this point.
Yep.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42495074
The Reagan tax cuts were too big but they got increased substantially during his term after that to be a lot more right sized. He recognized the error and adjusted.
Strange that https://jsonapi.org/examples/ never went into the masses, I suspect because it came out around the same time as GraphQL.

For me it’s the perfect mix between doing REST from scratch and GraphQL.

And it comes with the similar include and expand pattern that Stripe v2 introduced.
Blaming Kennedy is not supported by the absolute crushing Carter got by himself in the 1980 election, losing the electoral college 489/538 (4th biggest in history). This isn’t due to some unsuccessful Kennedy run. Reagan set the highest such win 4 years later with 525/538 electoral votes. Carter was quite unpopular with the public after such poor economic performance. 15% inflation is the worst in modern times; it would be impossible for any President to get re-elected under such national suffering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia...

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-inflation
Plenty of protests by US citizens take place against the bad choices America makes. Russian citizens can't be bothered to even do that, or maybe they agree with the destruction and killing in Ukraine.

No way to get a good read on it with them all staying silent.
I’m hoping they turn into a Wikipedia sort of funding model. Avoid viewpoint discrimination and serve messages to everyone with lots and lots of composable moderation tools.
I co-parent so can relate somewhat. I do get every other week to myself - but it's really hard to be a regular when you can only go every other week (similar issues with dating). I don't really have an answer - it's something I'm still trying to figure out.
He's in the "My guys can do now bad" gang. Always has been. Read his blog, it's 90% defending Big Tech and their abuses. He's especially bad about Apple, but all his angles are suspect.
This popped up, right after you posted your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42545255
Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard – Documentary [video]
Technical moats are the worst ones. The absolute best you can hope for is patents, but those take years to issue and then you have to fight after tbe fact. Trade secrets are nice but hard to defend.

The best moats are scale (Walmart), brand (“Google” means search), network effects (Facebook, TikTok). None of those are perfect but all are better than just having better tech.
Whats wrong with 1password?
No, they aren't compatible.
Given that Mr. Carter received a special disk with which he retrieved the lost material, it seems more like he accidentally deleted it, rather than just failing to save it.
... are you joking?

Healthcare is one of the most regulated industries in the United States.

Want to be a doctor? You've got the aptitude, the knowledge, the mindset, and the will, but a government-guaranteed cartel of medical schools won't let you in, so too damn bad. Learn to code.

Want to open a clinic? You really only need about a half-million in hardware to operate at the level of a 1980s hospital, but regulatory compliance will push your annual opex into the millions as a baseline, not to mention having to deal with the nightmare that is health insurance.

Those "massive entities" you mentioned are entirely protected from competition by force of law.

You know why healthcare used to be cheap? Nobody had insurance.

Anyone that had the aptitude and wanted to be a doctor basically could.

You went to the hospital, paid your bill, and that was that.

I'm not saying "zero regulation, caveat emptor!", but over the past hundred years, the precise opposite of "deregulation" has happened across every aspect of American life.
Yes. Microsoft licensed a version of Mosaic from Spyglass who got license from NCSA.The name change had nothing to do with the re-write. They never used Mosaic except in the name and were facing a suit from NCSA or the university (I can't remember) so they changed it. You are correct about Mozilla. I worked for Mozilla for 25 years and can attest to that.
> Israel could expand in that direction again

I agree that Israel harbors Zionist destructive ambitions, but it doesn't really extend beyond "Greater Israel" which is the extent of Israel in Biblical times under King David and King Solomon. That does not extend in Egypt's direction, but it does include Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, so it's no coincidence that Israel has pushed in those directions (southern Lebanon, Golan Heights, and the West Bank).
Since we're talking about the economic impact here, AGI(X) could be defined as being able to do X% of white collar jobs independently with about as much oversight as a human worker would need.

The exponential gains would come from increasing penetration into existing labor forces and industrial applications. The first arriver would have an advantage in being the first to be profitably and practically applicable to whatever domain it's used in.
Love the idea. I frequently use ChatGPT (out of habit) and while it's generating, copy/paste the same prompt into claude and grok. This seems like a good way to save time.
Easter eggs in Canadian offline Tax software
Ask HN: Stuck on a project, strategies to progress?
A lot of my prior open-source software was never finished or released, but I don't feel much regret as I mostly worked to build tools I wanted or learn a technology.

I'm stuck again. For the past few weeks, I've been building a website that I think will be useful and interesting to the tech crowd, but I'm stuck on a technical problem has derailed things.

I think I'm doing some things right: old projects died of scope creep; in this one I'm restricting the features in my initial release. But other things I'm not so sure. In my old projects, if I ran into a problem I couldn't solve, I'd work on another part of the system. Then I'd come back and have two disparate systems to debug and integrate ;)

These issues, plus Parkinson's law of "work expands so as to fill the time available", I feel the risk of it becoming another "forever project". I want to get this one out! Any advice?
You didn't really set up a completely separate server that can exist without Bluesky's central servers (because that's not possible), so it's not a fair comparison.

No, Mastodon was not designed to keep out anybody non-technical. In any given social circle, there is almost undoubtedly at least ONE person who can fire up a server and administrate it. You only need one sysadmin for your whole community - the rest can be moderators, and members can chip in some coin here and there to keep things running. That's about the simplest and most sustainable model I can possibly picture. If you don't know of someone in your social circles who runs a community, that's fine: start out on a public/larger one in the meantime to get things started, and you can move over later! If this is still too hard for someone, that's fine, there are countless centralized services they can remain on, like Facebook, iMessage, WhatsApp, SMS, etc.
Gore in 2000 is one of the US' great missed opportunities.

Having a president at the time who understood the science behind global warming would have been a game changer. (To say nothing of not invading Iraq)
How come it's cheaper in places where everyone has insurance?
With the way tech hiring is going it doesn't seem far fetched to see a retest of the 2008 bubble highs.
Almost every time I use an SDK I get burned. Happened for firebase, github, and a few others. Same with ORM's.
It is definitely a perk. If I see someone whose posts are abhorrent and someone is following them, then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either. Some people are block happy, but being able cut off chains of people is a perk. I'm also pretty sure OG Twitter and Mastodon let you see followers. If you could make them private, I never found any user that actually did that.
There are increasing numbers of new ways to generate feeds that suit your needs. I use the list functions to segregate people I follow into categories. There are a couple of built-in feeds that help discover new people.

But, the best thing is exemplified by graze.social which gives you a huge amount of ways to filter the firehose feed into whatever you want. Leave out the rage bait? It’s a filter sequence away.

Me? I do not want to avoid the villain a day problem. I want to see and block them myself, to know what’s going on.
A proof of concept still proves the concept no matter how little it does, as long as it does anything at all.

That's neither cherry picking nor misleading.
I assume its switch to subscription payments
Well, once the powerful steal it all, of course it becomes commoditization. Had they been required to abide by the law, something that few Silicon Valley VC-backed companies really worry about, this kind of "information" would not be a commodity, it'd be a lucrative property. But, Silicon Valley doesn't give a fuck about anyone so they just stole it all and now it's basically worthless as a result.
Shouldn't actual session keys rotate all the time, to prevent exactly that?
Discover is based off your follows and likes after a certain threshold. Before that it's based on everyone's likes and follows. For a new user it's not the best, but as you use the site it gets better.
> Beside the Vietname war

that's a pretty big "besides"
There's a PR implementing a similar approach. Seems it could use help to work out some kinks in the color mixing.

https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita/-/merge_requests/1783
https://krita-artists.org/t/can-we-get-mixbox-on-krita/64201...
Radiation and long term consequences of radioactive contamination is very specifically terrifying to the general public because you can neither see nor feel it happening and the consequences may not happen until much later. Both of those effects create an outsized defensive response that is not irrational at all but just most people are unable to modulate their perceptions of the size of threats like that.
I'm not surprised by your interpretation of a lot of my comment. Coastal/Urban America hasn't had anything resembling a common culture for a lot longer than 8 years now. I'd say that it's been a wholly different place pre- and post- 9/11.

Your view of America is limited by your experience of it in the past 8 years. I assure you, it was very very different even just 20 years ago. America pre-social media was a very very different place. We now have at least one (Gen Z), if not two full generations (younger Millenials) of Americans that have grown up with all of their experiences mediated in some form or another in a relatively international post social media landscape.

> And a lot of american are not.

Believe it or not, this is a pretty recent phenomena. It's only been since the late 90s as best. Hyphenated Americans is about 36 years old. It started with African-American" in about 1989 and didn't spread to others until at least another decade. Go check Google's ngram viewer for "African-American" and see for yourself.

Even much of the divisive language we have now is like 15 years old:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08944393211031452

A lot of this language coincided with Occupy Wall Street because the powers that be had a vested interest in diverting attention away from a discussion of class in America.

I'm a nationalist because I remember back when America largely had a singular identity and it was highly socially unusual to split up into all these sub identities. It still isn't the case for much of small town America and what coastal elites consider flyover country.

> But all in all it turned out well.

Only because of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that allowed a single cohesive identity to form over like 40 years. The history of America is actually pretty messy.

> America was never a "high trust culture".

Absolutely not true. It was much much higher trust when I first moved here in 1986 (which is 39 years ago, not 29 years ago. I did my math wrong in my comment and just now realized it).

> It's interesting that you seem to read the exact opposite of what "e pluribus unum". It's a celebration of differences...

This is not at all what it was three decades ago and further back until the origin of the country's founding. It was a celebration of finding commonality despite differences. What you're describing is a complete retcon of what it historically has meant since it was first used on the great seal in 1776.

Go watch American classic movies and TV shows from the founding of Hollywood until about 1990. Much of it was highly representative of American culture I experienced in the earlier years when I first moved here. Much much much higher trust than today.
A few years ago, 1password became an electron app - and the Internet seemed to lose its mind when that happened.
You cannot IP natural phenomena so that license is void.
I understand the point you are making and I disagree with it.

Software is not a religious text. There is good software and bad software and good and bad ways to make software. Usually the devil is in the details and context matters a lot in practice, so it's hard to just write down the answer to all things in all scenarios.

But in a technical interview things are pretty cut and dry. There are in fact right answers and wrong answers and if an interviewer is nitpicking during an interview then they are in fact not doing their job as an interviewer well. If they do the same thing on the job then they are at best a mediocre engineer.
>Your intentions might not have been to make money, but you were creating social credit that could be redeemed for a higher and better paying job. With GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc., you are adding to your resume, but with AI, you literally get nothing in return for contributing.

I guess I never really thought about having a dog in this race (effectively being a tradesman as I am, and not a "content creator"). I did write a ton on ServerFault.com. I guess I am in this unwittingly.

I'm a little salty about the LLM training on my Stack Exchange answers but I knew what I was getting in to when I signed-up. I don't really subscribe to notions of "intellectual property" so I don't feel strongly on that front.

It just feels impolite and rude. More like plagiarism and less like copyright infringement. A matter of tact between people, versus a legal matter.

The way LLMs turn the collective human expression into "slop" that "they" then "speak" with a tone of authority about feels scummy. It feels like a person who has read a few books and picked up the vernacular and idiom of a trade confidently lying about being an expert.

I can't attribute that scumminess to the LLM itself, since it's just a pile of numbers. I absolutely attribute that scumminess to the companies making money from them.

re: Stack Exchange social credit and redeeming it - I'm not a good self-promoter, and admittedly ServerFault.com is a much smaller traffic Stack Exchange site than Stack Overflow, but begin the top-ranked user on the site for 5+ years didn't confer much in the way of real-world benefits. I had a ton of fun though.

(I got a tiny bit of name recognition from some IRL people and a free trip to the Stack Overflow offices in NYC one time. I definitely got a boost of happiness every time a friend related a story to the effect of: "I ran into an issue, search-engined it, and came up with something you wrote on Server Fault that solved my problem.")
Did you mean, "Julia never found any widespread adoption and remains an obscure, niche language"?
Fortran was the world's top programming language until the new millennium and is still among the top ten most popular. Arrays in Fortran can start from any index; the default choice is 1, which can be overridden with literally one keystroke: 0.
He leased two, one for himself and one for Rosalynn.
I agree. He got more hate than he deserved, and was a human being that cared about people, which is something the US government seems to be lacking last few generations.
Did they license and pay for all of the non-profit work they utilized in GPT-3? OR are you claiming it was a clean-room re-write? I think you're pretty naive if you think the latter happened.
Would agree except for the part where they have not said anything concrete about their funding model.

If you’re talking about venture money, it’s a public benefit LLC. The demands that can be made on them are limited by that.
Mastodon/ActivityPub is not Twitter. It's not millions of people in one stadium. It's more like dozens of rooms in a big mansion. (sorry, the analogy isn't perfect) ... You don't just walk into the room with a bunch of nazis because that place is probably going to suck to have a conversation in. Look at what the conversations and social expectations are before you jump in, and things will work out a lot better for everyone. That's not a bad user experience, that's just "socializing with fellow humans".
I'm not sure that they are going to run non-CBTC trains through the new tunnel.

I have heard it said that the level crossing removal program is associated with a goal of moving to driverless trains network-wide. Presumably there is a network-wide CBTC migration plan.
Yup, europe’s largest.
* Well, I am not sure what to say other than: You are wrong. We might actually have one of the worst.*

if you believe this and your children are here in the US that would be borderline child abuse to subject your own flesh and blood to the worst educational system…

I said FoxNews mostly because you are tauting word-for-word party-line garbage without any thought of your own on the matter.

people from all over the world come to the United States (including yourself and myself) to get educated. Absolute best higher education schools are here. If polled random 100 people from developer nations to name 10 non-US universities roughly 99 of them would stop at like 6.

shitting on US education is ring-wing garbage you are trying to sell and you should not be selling it cause no sane person will be buying it.
I don’t see how it can be a Twitter replacement, at best a reddit/Discord/IRC replacement but even that seems very unlikely.

e.g. Are there even guarantees that a bad admin can’t mess with someone’s previous posts?
Toronto massively expanded shelther programs throughout covid via fairly expensive transitional housing units (i.e. hotels) that cost 300m for ~2000 spaces, or 150k per unit / year. It's structurally not sustainable and the political solution is basically tell homeless they're SOL. The hacky work around is tent cities in parks during summer and an insulated box during winter.
Not impressed. I'd be much more impressed if we could run software like Little Snitch on iOS, or install Firefox. Or even just side load apps without pay $100/year.

(Note: a Safari webview with a Firefox logo on it does not count.)